Non-Fungible Token
I define Non-Fungible Token as a specific document who's ownership is recorded into a blockchain, or other distributed ledger.
In this case, ownership is defined as a bidirectional mapping from an NFT and a public key or identity. This digital ownership by itself does not constitute ownership in a legal or lawful sense, but simply associating a public key with a hash of a document.
Lawful Ownership
Legal or lawful ownership can be established by following certain conventions, and mapping agreements between minds to agreements demarcated in code and cryptographic statements.
Mapping Cryptographic Statements to Lawful Statements
For a cryptographic statement to have the power of Law in the Real World, people using them must agree what they mean.
In the above example, what does owner: "email@example.org"
really mean? Does it mean that whoever controls the email address email@example.org
is the owner of the given iPhone? What happens if someone guesses the password to the email address? Are they now the lawful owner of the iPhone?
Perhaps there is another mutually agreed upon document describing how to establish the true owner of a digital asset, in this case the email address? Perhaps we agree that to own an email, you need ownership of an NFT signed by the email provider that is also signed by at least 5 people?
The details of how to establish ownership of digital entities, and how ownership of a digital entity maps to ownership of a physical entity is up for debate and ultimately up to the people using the NFTs to decide. If people cannot agree, then the technology will not magically save us.